The target audience for this reading list is enterprise software developers and architects. I chose to focus on system design, data modelling, security, devops, process, creativity, and computer science foundations which are essential and generally useful to most software engineers. Enjoy, happy reading, and let me know what you think!Code Complete by Steve McConnell — This comprehensive, classic tome on software design, construction, and craftsmanship has stood the test of time. McConnell’s discussion of metaphors, #architecture, debugging, quality assurance and ethics are excellent and still relevant in the context of the cloud, troubleshooting complex systems, fixing security defects, and collaborating with diverse teams. My favorite proverb therein is: measure twice, cut once. Visit the (...)

Taking a Stand on Personal Safety, and Other Actions for AlliesEach week, we share five simple actions to create a more inclusive workplace and be a better ally.Photo of a doorstop by David Wall via Flickr, CC BY 2.01. Realize personal safety is a concern, even in professional settingsThis week, the Des Moines Register reported on lawsuit by a businesswoman who was raped in her Embassy Suites hotel room. The front desk had given the attacker a key to her room without asking for proof that he was a guest. Then, upon realizing the victim had engaged the safety latch on the door, the attacker got a hotel staff member to disable it. All it took was a simple story about how his girlfriend had locked him out of their room after having a fight.When Chad Loder, CEO of Habitu8, tweeted about the (...)

A JOURNEY INTO THE JUICY COMPLEXITY OF REGENERATIVE CULTUREThank you so much for this wonderfully honest review of how Designing Regenerative Cultures landed within you. I am deeply grateful you gave it time and hope the book with remain useful to you. Lots of love, DanielI knew a lot about regenerative #culture before I opened this book. I knew how it differs from sustainability (although I actually see #regeneration as fundamental to true sustainability; it’s just that mainstream views of sustainability don’t recognize that). But I’ve now learned that what I knew is clearly only a beginning. So I’ve ended up writing two parallel reviews, a new adventure for me… Here’s my first one:1.I have not finished this book. I was waiting until I finished it to write a review. But now I realize that my (...)

Online booking giants #Airbnb, #Booking.com, #Expedia and #TripAdvisor are fuelling human rights violations against Palestinians by listing hundreds of rooms and activities in Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land, including East Jerusalem, Amnesty International said today. In a new report, ‘Destination: Occupation’, the organization documents how online booking companies are driving tourism to illegal Israeli settlements and contributing to their existence and expansion.

Israel’s settling of Israeli civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) violates international humanitarian law and is a war crime. Despite this, the four companies continue to operate in the settlements, and profit from this illegal situation.

One of the settlements included in Amnesty International’s report is #Kfar_Adumim, a growing tourism hub located less than two kilometres from the Bedouin village of #Khan_al-Ahmar, whose imminent and complete demolition by Israeli forces has been given a green light by Israel’s Supreme Court. The expansion of Kfar Adumim and other surrounding settlements is a key driver of human rights violations against the local Bedouin community.

“Israel’s unlawful seizure of Palestinian land and expansion of settlements perpetuates immense suffering, pushing Palestinians out of their homes, destroying their livelihoods and depriving them of basics like drinking water. Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia and TripAdvisor model themselves on the idea of sharing and mutual trust, yet they are contributing to these human rights violations by doing business in the settlements,” said Seema Joshi, Amnesty International’s Director of Global Thematic Issues.

“The Israeli government uses the growing tourism industry in the settlements as a way of legitimizing their existence and expansion, and online booking companies are playing along with this agenda. It’s time for these companies to stand up for human rights by withdrawing all of their listings in illegal settlements on occupied land. War crimes are not a tourist attraction.”

According to statistics, the majority of the population does not even read a book a year. On the other hand, one often hears that “successful” people read at least ten books a year. Whether these facts are true or not, they inspired me almost ten years ago to make me read at least 50 books each year. That’s how my “52 Books in 52 Week Challenge” came into being.In 2018 I had the “ten year anniversary” of this challenge. On the one hand, I wanted to introduce the 52 books that I read last year, on the other hand, I wanted to explain in a video how I actually manage to read 52 books in a year:▻https://medium.com/media/793b24aad15fb9794badd4b1d6908e2f/hrefThe key things are:Know why you want to read so many books.Know how many you really want to read.Don’t worry about how too much.Combine reading (...)

When I was kid, I bought a learning kit from the book fair that taught me about electricity. It showed me how to wire an LED light and make a buzzer. I tried to set a trap to alarm me when somebody came to my room. Around the same time in life, I had a teacher who said I was lousy at math. I’ve avoided anything math or science-related as much as possible ever since.Two things happened this week related to that math aversion. I started an intensive 10-week course to learn software development, with the end goal of finding an entry level job as a software developer. And towards the end of the week, another learning kit arrived in the mail to teach me about circuits and solar electricity.I had a difficult time deciding whether or not to attend the coding class. But my first week of class (...)

Visualizing semantic relationships using spatial embeddingsSemantic Spatial Embedding in VR🔍 Exploring Content ( the traditional way )If you could search your own library of books digitally, how would you do it?A simple text search could work but that approach typically only answers the question “where are these terms mentioned in my books?”There are some questions that would be hard for a text search to answer:How would I find content where certain keywords may not be present?How do all my books relate to each other?Which of the books that I have not read yet would be a good place to start?These questions are trying to access the “semantics” or the “meaning” within content regardless of the actual words used.Beyond the Simple Text SearchUnicon (my most excellent employer) authorized me to spend (...)

Most of us want to read more — few of us find the time or the motivation to do it. #books clubs are an excellent motivator while expanding the worth you get from #reading a book on your own. You receive the benefit of a diverse range of opinions on each topic which makes every book more valuable and aids in the retention of the information you’ve consumed.We will get through a book in two weeks. This gives people enough time to order the physical copy if that’s their preference.During the process, the group acts as an open forum to discuss what you’ve read, why you find it interesting or the reason you disagree (especially if you disagree!). From there, discussion will naturally occur which has enough differing perspective and viewpoints to make things compelling and interesting.The only rule (...)

This is an excerpt of my upcoming ebook Laravel Testing 101. If you haven’t read the previous chapters yet (available for free here: Adding Tests to your Laravel CRUD Application: Where to Start? and here: What should we be testing in a [laravel] CRUD application?), please do so before reading this one.Now that we have a better idea about the functionalities we should be testing in our Laravel application, let’s start with testing what a guest can do, since it is less complicated than what a logged in user can do.As we discussed I the previous chapter, here are the functionalities related to guests that we have in the application:A guest could see all the articles when visiting /articlesA guest could see a single articleA guest could see a user profileA guest could not write a new article (...)

Nine Must Read Books about BlockchainBooks about blockchainInvesting in Blockchain companies is no different from investing in any other industry. To succeed, you need a thorough understanding of the space you plan to be in before you even think of allocating any capital toward a particular project or asset. It is not an accident that “do your own research” has become more and more of a chant for the Crypto niche in the Blockchain industry, over time. Following this mantra is what leads to rational investing and trading in any sphere. Below, we have compiled a list for you of what we believe are the must read books for any aspiring Blockchain and Crypto investor.Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor’s Guide to Bitcoin and Beyondby Chris Burniske and Jack TatarOf all of the books about (...)

Cosmic JS makes it easy to manage content for your React applications. Cosmic enables developers to build modern, content-powered applications without the hassle of maintaining installed CMS infrastructure. The Cosmic Dashboard gives the content creator an unmatched, delightful experience to create content.In this tutorial I’ll demonstrate using the Cosmic JS CLI to install a new Cosmic-powered React app recently debuted by the Cosmic JS Community. The Book App was built using React and Redux with content powered by Cosmic JS. Content creators can manage #books including images, titles, content, authors, and book genre/category. Search functionality is included by typing author name or book title. Sort by book categories and publish a book card from the custom admin dashboard.You can (...)

At the FLAT Art Book Fair of Torino, Femke will present Books With an Attitude. Books deserve their hallmark “with an Attitude” when they are made with Free, Libre and Open Source Software and published under an open content license by Constant. This Brussels’ based association for art and media, collaborated with different designers to experiment the interrelation between tools, design and content. After almost ten years, the catalog now includes e-books, manuals, software-releases, (...)

You open Facebook and spot your friend on the beach with a cocktail in hand, and then your colleague in some picturesque settings that are, most certainly, far away from the office. Moreover, the ads with stunning snaps of different resorts are chasing you every time you open the browser. Travelling is no longer about intricate plans, large budgets and “we can afford it twice a year” thing. People want to discover more — and not only millennials, senior travelers are making more and more travels each year. Reflecting the demand, the market graciously responds with the reduced prices and sweet propositions to the increasing needs.Over 1 in 3 travelers across countries are interested in using digital assistants to research or book travel, according to Google/Phocuswright Research.People tend (...)

Networks Of One’s Own is a periodic para-nodal publication that is itself collectively written in a network. Each of the episodes is thought of as the ’release’ of a software stack, contextualised in its specific practice. The series aims to document a set of tools, experiences, ways of working that are diverse in terms of their temporality, granularity and persistence. This first episode in the series includes documentation, manuals, essays and a software release of Etherbox, a constellation (...)

How the best product teams exploit homo sapiens’ defining traitBy Winston Christie-Blick | product manager at productboardThe best product managers are masterful illusionists. And to work their magic, they exploit a trait that is unique to humans — or to be more precise, to homo sapiens.After all, it is this trait that gave us an edge over our brawnier, heartier neanderthal brethren and explains why we sapiens have imposed ourselves at the top of the food chain wherever we’ve settled on Earth, even amidst predatory saber tooth tigers, imposing mammoths and mastodons.That trait is the ability to #mythologize, to imagine entities that don’t physically exist, perceive them as though they were real, and to do so collectively.Such is the claim made by Yuval Noah Harari in his bestselling Sapiens: A (...)

Wordpress, as we all know, is the most popular CMS used around the world.Because of it’s easy to use and setup, anyone can easily launch their website either for personal or service purpose.Due to this, the CMS has found its popularity among many small and medium-sized enterprises and individuals.SourceIf you are providing services on an hourly basis and still making and receiving calls for booking an appointment and doing a heck amount of paperwork, here is an online solution for all your worries.If you have your website made in Wordpress and looking to increase your booking figures, online booking can make your day.Booking Commerce is world’s first online comprehensive platform for booking that you can easily integrate with your website.Now either you have a website or don’t, you can make (...)

Though UX/UI design has no widely-accepted definition, we can still say with certainty that it’s about the user and creating the pleasure when using a project. Such a big subject can be intimidating on first glance, and the sheer amount of UX/UI books also make most of us feel overwhelmed. For those looking for expert techniques so as to get an edge in UX design, we have rounded up a complete list of 12 free UX and UI books that anyone can enjoy and benefit from. Take a look and may you find the favorite one to sharpen your skills!1. The Encyclopedia of Human Computer InteractionFree and high quality textbooks recommended by Don Norman, “I highly recommend the Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, the breadth and the depth of the invited contributions are quite impressive, all with (...)